Jani Hartikainen has started off a new series that looks specifically at the Zend_Acl component of the Zend Framework starting with this new post looking at a few of the misconceptions surrounding the component.

I'm going to be writing a weekly series of posts on Zend_Acl. This first post will clear up some common misconceptions regarding Zend_Acl, introduce creating ACLs for simple applications, and give some examples on using the ACL in both non-Zend Framework and Zend Framework applications.

To show the most basic usage (and set a foundation for future articles), he creates a simple ACL system for a Zend Framework application. The system sets up a few different roles (guest, member) and some rules to show who can access what. He ties this into his preDispatch method in his My_Plugin_Acl plugin so that it runs right before the rest of the request is processed. If the user is not allowed, it kicks them other to the authentication controller for them to log in.